The scholarship of this nonfiction work is remarkable, and it offers many new insights into life on the frontier during the 19th century. As the title suggests, it chronicles the rise and fall of the Comanches, and it particularly tells the stories of Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah. Cynthia was with her family who were so far out on the frontier that there was almost no one behind them, between their location in West Texas and civilization. The Parkers underestimated the danger they faced, and then most of them were murdered and Cynthia Ann was captured at the age of 9 in 1936. She was held captive for many years and bore her husband, the great Comanche war chief Peta Nocona, three children, including Quanah who became a greater warrior than Geronimo. Gwynne does a good job putting all these events in the historical chronology of events that we know about, like the Alamo and Custer, but he adds so much more that I had never heard about. All of this is well documented from personal reports of the people involved and from contemporary documents. The story of Cynthia Ann was a particular famous one at the time and one that I had read about before. Gwynne did a great job telling the stories of the conflict of cultures, not only the advancing white Americans and various Indian tribes, but also the many Indian-Indian cultural problems. He clearly explained the lack of central organization of the Comanches. The history of the Texas Rangers was particularly telling and offered a good background to the McMurtry trilogy. There were times when I thought Gwynne was too detailed so that the action unnecessarily slowed down. This book could be seen as a reference work, one which should be consulted anytime someone was writing about this era in U.S. history.
No comments:
Post a Comment